New Edition of the Compendium of EU Legislation on Judicial Cooperation in Civil Matters

The Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers of the European Commission has recently published a fourth edition of the Compendium of European Union legislation on judicial cooperation in civil and commercial matters.

This document is extremely valuable and its updated publication is to be welcomed.

In a common judicial area, marked by a tradition of written law and codification, the collection of legal texts is a key instrument for accessing the law. Judicial cooperation in civil matters pursuant to Article 81 TFEU is an area that needs this compilation of the legal acquis in order to facilitate its reading, understanding and, therefore, its application.

The abstract of the new edition of the Compendium reads as follows:

Twenty-five years after the Amsterdam Treaty conferred competence on the European Union to legislate in the area of private international law, the creation of an area of civil justice in the EU based on the principle of mutual trust is entering an era of maturity. It is now marked more by a process of consolidation, rather than growth, and by providing a strong foundation to support the European Commission’s political priorities. Since the last edition of this Compendium, the EU’s legislature has adopted new instruments and many existing instruments have been updated, be it by amendments and corrigenda, or by the adoption of a recast instrument. The latter category includes the recast Regulation on jurisdiction, the recognition and enforcement of decisions in matrimonial matters and the matters of parental responsibility, and on international child abduction, as well as the recast Service of documents Regulation and the recast Taking of evidence Regulation. The success of the EU legislators in keeping up with recent technical and societal developments is demonstrated by the 2023 Digitalisation Regulation, and by the 2024 Anti-SLAPP Directive. Thanks to the valuable feedback from users of the Compendium, this edition also contains several instruments adopted by the Hague Conference on Private International Law, because of their connection with and importance for the European civil justice area.

The document can be downloaded in all EU official languages here.